


Money and Blood

by RosemarysBabysitter (TashaElizabeth)



Category: Trouble in the Heights (2011)
Genre: F/M, Kid Fic, Pregnancy, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2015-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-10 16:09:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3296537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TashaElizabeth/pseuds/RosemarysBabysitter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fill for the promp '"oc is pregnant and i wanna see how nevada reacts from finding out until the oc gives birth" from a fabulous anon on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Money and Blood

Nevada Ramirez's location was not a thing that went unreported. Even just stepping in from the cold for a cup of coffee warranted some notice by passersby. It was not unlike how medieval villagers took care to warn each other about the presence and temperament of local wolves. The gossip moved across the alleyways and over rooftops all through the Heights. As the length of time Nevada spent lost in thought lengthened, the tone and urgency of these rumors increased.

_“I’m telling you man. He’s just been sitting in that coffee shop for the last three hours.”_

_“Jesus, man, some motherfucker’s gonna get killed.”_

When he came to a decision and rose from the table the action created a wave of jitters and flinches surging out from him in an expanding circle. The waitress ducked into the kitchen to avoid mentioning anything so crass as a bill. The other patrons all slunk into their seats. Nevada adjusted his shoulders and stormed out of the cafe. At the corner store he bought a large, tacky plastic wrapped bouquet of flowers.

Three days later, to much speculation, he slapped a suspicious amount of money down on the front counter of a real estate office and put a down payment on an upper level apartment in Inwood.

_“It’s a grow house. He’s expanding operations.”_

_“You idiot. Who the fuck gonna buy a grow house with floor to ceiling windows?”_

Nevada did not seem to be gone anymore than usual for all the furniture that got moved into the apartment in Inwood. It came in flat packed and assumptions could not be drawn from its make up. The idea of a frustrated Nevada, sitting on the floor with beer and allen wrench cussing out a rocking chair from IKEA occurred to more than one acquaintance. They stifled their laughter. The apartment’s windows were covered with billowing curtains in pastel shade. The shadows that played against them revealed little but that the apartment was more and more frequently occupied.

Things went on in much the same way they always had. Nevada went about his business and the network of phone calls, text messages and stoop gossip kept tabs on his movements. Business was good with one or two exceptions. The weed ran freely in the parks; the clubs were kept humming with coke and pills.

It was over half a year after the coffee shop incident when the usual kind of girl, painfully young and terrified, came to Nevada looking to work out some debt in the usual kind of way. He looked at her sweet, dark face, highlighted at cheekbone and eyebrow with too much powder. He looked at her red, wet mouth. She got down on her knees in front of him and he told her to go home to her mother and never see him again. She fled in gratitude.

_“Man’s getting soft in his old age.”_

_“Getting stupid, you mean? He gets too soft and they’ll just be another one after him.”_

One day in the park, running down a dealer with poor liquidity management, Nevada got a call. The dealer was halfway out of his sneakers with his head bouncing off a brick wall. The issue of repayment had not been yet resolved. Nevada took the call and then he walked away. Behind him, an associate bellowed in confusion but was ignored. He got into a cab and went to the agreed upon location.

In a bright, chilled hospital room, a woman slept. She kept one hand on the plastic bassinet. Nevada went to it and picked up the bundle inside.

A nurse came and gave hesitant, sweetly intentioned instructions on how best to hold a newborn. They proved unnecessary. Without experience, a natural inclination took over the huddling placement of Nevada’s hands, the motion of his arms. He cradled the girl against his chest and looked down at her with serious, thoughtful eyes. She was very small and pink.

He then turned to the nurse and pronounced her full name, taking care with the middle name, before pushing her into the nurse's arms and leaving the room, the ward, the hospital entirely. He would not ever say the girl’s full name again.

Fourteen hours later a rival entrepreneur expressed his business disagreement with Nevada by way of a semi automatic on the street directly outside the little apartment. There were seventeen shots fired and it took the police an hour and forty five minutes to arrive.

_“Did they kill him?”_

_“Nah. You can’t kill that motherfucker.”_

The episode destroyed every pane of the apartment’s beautiful windows and two panels of Nevada’s car. When it became apparent that he was not dead he took a deep breath and felt a joyful sense of focus. The thoughts that had been nagging him these past months melted away under under a simple, happy rage. He took action at once.

Nevada put a lot of the woman’s clothes into a duffel bag and buried within them a battered photo album. Then he went storming into the hospital and, finding she would not yet be released, allowed the hesitant, sweetly intentioned maternity nurse to mop dried blood from his face and pull several shards of glass from the area directly around his eye. Afterward he slept in a chair with his hand inside his coat and his legs draped over the entrance. He woke with each shift change and passing hospital visitor.

The woman would not take a newborn on a airplane. It was unclear whether one actually could take a newborn on an airplane. Exhausted, she put the baby seat in the back of a rental car with tinted back windows and fell asleep on top of it, her arms cradled around the plastic handle. Nevada, on half a night’s paranoid dozing, got into the driver’s seat and drove south. When he reached the end of America he threw his gun into Biscayne Bay and got all alone on a plane back to New York City, returning before anyone noticed he was gone.

_“Dude, you hear about them motherfuckers tried to take out Ramirez?”_

_“Shit, my cousin saw the scene after the cops got there. They were scraping their asses off the pavement. They were fucking puddles, man.”_

This was happiness. This was acceptable. This was life. It went on without interruption.

The money, the small wrapped gifts, were all mailed to the same somewhere south, to the heated safety of perpetual summer and the anonymity provided by distance and a careful personal guard. On the dirty beaches, sparkling brilliant white in the sun, a little girl grew through a series of white cotton dresses. She had birthday parties with ornate cakes and cold lemonade at which she received bicycles, video game consoles, huge doll houses. She had eyes that looked to the ocean and watched it with a wide, blankly fascinated expression. She had dark hair and smooth perfect skin that had never, ever been hurt. Her father, it was evident, loved her very much.


End file.
